If you own a website or blog and you want to dramatically increase the number and quality of visitors you get, you need to encourage people who visit your site, to share what they find with their friends.

Thankfully, we know that when people find material on a website, which they believe will be of interest to their friends and contacts, they are more than happy to forward it to them. This is why websites like FriendFeed, StumbleUpon, YouTube, Twitter and Digg have become so popular. They allow people to easily share things with their friends.

In order for you to benefit from the viral power of the Internet, there are two things you should consider.

1. Content

Firstly, you need to have content on your site, which is worth sharing. This means your content has to be better and more valuable than the typical material, which people find on your kind of site or blog. Many blog owners feel compelled to write ‘something’ every day; indeed many so-called “social marketing gurus” even write posts telling people to do this. The challenge this presents, is that very few businesspeople have the time required to write new, valuable content every day.

Post only when you have something worth sharing and focus on quality, not quantity.

2. Make it easy to share

Secondly, you need to make it super-easy for people to share your material with their friends. I use a free plugin for this blog called Sexy Bookmarks, (see below), which allows people to share what they find here, on most popular networksg – quickly and easily. Just a few mouse clicks and that’s it!

As a result of focusing on what I believe to be valuable content AND making it as easy as possible for people to share it, I get thousands of new visitors from sharing / bookmarking websites every week.

A quick tip!

Take a moment to look at the last few websites, articles, videos, blog posts or whatever; which YOU have passed on to your friends. Now ask yourself this question: “What was it that motivated you to share that material and how can YOU use that same kind of motivation, to get others to share YOUR content?”

The next time someone tells you that they would love to use your services or buy your products, but they have found a cheaper alternative, ask them a version of the following question:

“If someone you loved needed heart surgery, would you go for the best surgeon you could afford or the cheapest surgeon you could find?”

This type of question is superb for focusing people’s attention on the importance of quality over ‘cheap!’ Obviously, you can use less emotive alternatives to the one used above. The key is to focus them on the importance of value.